It is said that in the parlour of the average Englishman you will usually find “The Soul’s Awakening’* hanging on the wall, “The way of an Eagle” in the bookshelf and a volume of Bach on the pianoforte. We unmusical English have taken John Sebastian Bach to our hearts.

A young exquisite once said to me, “I don’t like Bach, he is so bourgeois” to which I probably answered that being bourgeois myself I considered Bach the greatest of all composers. It is Bach’s intense humanity which endears him to me and my fellow bourgeois. 

The proletarians (if there were any in this country) would be too much occupied with their wrongs, and the “governing -classes” (if indeed they existed outside the imaginaton of the ‘New Statesman’) would be too much occupied in preserving their rights to have time to be human. The warm human sentiments are reserved for the bourgeois; therefore of all Bach’s works it is those great choral expressions of his personal and anthropomorphic religion which appeal most to us country and small-towns folk.

It is my privilege once a year to conduct our local choirs in concerts of great music and of all that great music it is Bach, his Matthew Passion, his B minor Mass, his Church Cantatas which seem to come most naturally to our minds and our hearts. My business on these occasions, is to come in at the last minute, wave a stick about and say ‘very good’, but I know well that the real hard work has been done elsewhere, namely at those weekly winter evenings with their devoted leaders and enthusiastic singers who for the sake of music will after a hard day’s work endure arduous toil and drudgery for an end which only gradually appears in view.

Week by week these dedicated hierophants trudge miles through mud and snow to a cold but stuffy village schoolroom lit by one smelly oil lamp which usually goes out half-way through. The only accompaniment is a strange array of broken keys and snapped wires which was once a pianoforte. They are but a small body, there are probably only two tenors and one of these being the village doctor, is invariably called out in the middle to officiate at one of those happy events which are so frequent in our prolific neighbourhood, leaving Mr. Smith of Kosikot to struggle with the cruelly high tenor part alone. However, nothing daunts us (if I may for the moment identify myself with this glorious company of apostles). There we sit, week after week, wrestling with this strange mystery of music and saying in our hearts, “I will not let thee go unless thou bless me.” We are not experts, many of us have at first but the vaguest idea of what sounds are represented by these curious little black blobs and straight stems at which we stare, but this weakness is also our strength; until we have made these sounds bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, we cannot attempt to sing them. The expert can pass from one musical experience to another, lightly, easily and forgetfully, but we, when once great music has burnt into our minds and souls, have it for an everlasting possession. 

For a while we work by faith alone, then one day suddenly revelation comies to us, the notes we are singing are, all at once, not mere sounds, but symbols of a new world, something beyond mundane experience, We have looked through the “magic casements, opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.” 

But the end is not yet. On a certain day in Spring we shall meet all the other small bands of singers who like us have been struggling alone.

Then we shall realize the profound mathematical formula of all choral singing : 2+2=40. 

By the very force of numbers we have each magnified our own power and irnagination tenfold. Not that we have lost our own individuality, but that we have merged it in harmonius concord with the other devotees who like us have been working for this same end. (Is this not perhaps a microcosm of what we all wish for the whole world ? ).

By faith, hope and love we have achieved that, compared with which the achievements of the greatest virtuoso, if he be not also informed by these three, is but as sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. We have unlocked the heart of music’s mystery, we have found our faith and have proclaimed it to all such as have ears to hear. Some indeed have not such ears—we are not “news” nor do we wish to be. The “intelligentsia” ignore us, the clever young men Who “do” the music for ‘advanced’ journals have (thank God ! ) never heard of us. The most we ever achieve is a patronizing paragraph in one of the daily papers. We are in fact local musicians and are content to remain so. I believe that it is better to be vitally parochial than to be an emasculate cosmopolitan. 

The great names in music were at first local and the greatest of all, John Sebastian Bach remained a local musician all his life. History emanates from the parish pump. We musicians of hundreds of Abingers all over the country are making history because we are laying well and truly those foundations from which alone the great artist can spring.